While The Rest Of Us Die 2x1

1. Let me ask you:

2. What s happening in this country? Who owns it?

3. Where's the money, who took it?

4. - The Rochesters. - Rochester?

5. You mean like in the burbs here?

6. Oh, you're thinking small.

7. Do you ever feel like all you do is work,

8. but never seem to get ahead?

9. I'm thinking the money s in the Cayman Islands and shit.

10. Yeah. GM not paying anything.

11. Amazon not paying anything.

12. Stock markets like this, and nobody here got stock!

13. How the —- is the stock market doing this?

14. And there s nothing in here...

15. - Right?

16. Like the system is set up for you to fail?

17. It doesn t make any sense!

18. There s a record stock market.

19. Who the —- s buying a car?

20. Look at my raggedy ass shit, I'm not buying a car.

21. You re right. It s a rigged game.

22. For over 70 years, our leaders have told us

23. one thing under the bright lights...

24. The protection of the lives and property of Americans

25. is the responsibility of all public officials.

26. I care, we're trying.

27. We have it so well under control.

28. Help is here, and we will not stop working for you.

29. But for decades, America's shadow government and

30. its powerful friends have spent trillions of dollars on

31. an agenda that serves their interests, not ours.

32. You guys paid for all this.

33. So when the shit really hits the fan...

34. We're on our own.

35. This is not science fiction.

36. This is reality in America right now.

37. Truth is, the rich and powerful will do whatever

38. it takes to save themselves,

39. While The Rest Of Us Die.

40. For years, nobody could figure out how

41. Jeffrey Epstein afforded so many luxuries.

42. A high school math teacher who lied about his degree

43. and was fired for poor performance.

44. And then fired again from his job at an investment firm.

45. But behind these doors, Epstein hobnobbed with

46. some of the richest and most powerful people in the world.

47. Sheikhs from the Middle East.

48. Great intellectuals and thinkers and businessmen.

49. Epstein sort of had like a Svengali-like hold over

50. some of the, you know, wealthiest,

51. most powerful businessmen in the country.

52. And somehow, this didn t change,

53. even after Epstein was convicted for having sex

54. with teenage girls.

55. How did Epstein translate this incredible access to

56. power into his personal wealth?

57. Some speculate he secretly

58. worked for intelligence agencies.

59. Others assumed he was supplying rich old men with

60. underage girls for sex...

61. and getting paid to keep quiet.

62. But according to some reports,

63. the secret to Epstein s vast fortune is that he supplied

64. his mega-rich friends with something they valued

65. more than sex

66. a way to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

67. The Epstein story s kind of like covering the weather.

68. Sometimes it rains, and when it does, it pours.

69. Yesterday was one of those days.

70. Take Leon Black,

71. the controversial CEO of one of Wall Street s most

72. lucrative investment firms.

73. His net worth? More than $9 billion.

74. He once claimed he was being extorted by a Russian model

75. whom he d given millions over a five-year affair.

76. But what really shocked people was his

77. business dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.

78. The private equity billionaire, Leon Black,

79. hired him to avoid about $2 billion in taxes,

80. using something called a grantor retained annuity trust.

81. A GRAT.

82. A GRAT is just part of an arsenal of complex schemes,

83. like equity swaps and offshore shell companies,

84. that the super wealthy use to avoid

85. paying vast amounts of tax.

86. With cute names like the Double Irish

87. with a Dutch sandwich.

88. The scheme works by transferring your company s

89. intellectual property to an Irish subsidiary that s

90. actually managed by people in some other place,

91. like Bermuda.

92. And then, the IP is licensed to another Irish company

93. That's actually in Ireland, which sends everything to

94. another subsidiary in the Netherlands,

95. which then sends everything to an offshore tax haven

96. often on a beach where the IRS can t touch it.

97. Easy Peasy.

98. It s all difficult to understand.

99. And that's by design.

100. Which is why someone like Leon Black might pay someone

101. like Jeffrey Epstein a seemingly massive fee,

102. even by Wall Street standards.

103. If you re gonna save two billion dollars...

104. Ah, maybe paying 158 million

105. to save two billion is a good investment.

106. Epstein was just one small part of a vast

107. industry that exists for the sole purpose of

108. helping some of the richest people in America

109. avoid their fair share of taxes.

110. It s all part of a larger story...

111. of how the wealthy have used their riches and power

112. to trick us all out of the American dream...

113. rigging the system so they always win,

114. while the rest of us lose.

115. The wealth defense industry is the army of tax attorneys,

116. wealth managers, accountants.

117. People who work with the world s wealthiest families.

118. They're paid millions to hide trillions.

119. They are the financial butlers to the super rich.

120. Chuck Collins doesn t just investigate this complex

121. world of hiding wealth. It s an inherited skill.

122. He happens to be the great grandson of Oscar Meyer.

123. I grew up in the wealthiest 1%.

124. My great grandfather ran

125. a successful meatpacking business.

126. 4 generations later, here I am.

127. Now I made a decision in my early 20s that I didn t

128. really want to benefit from a system of dynastic and

129. inherited wealth. What that did is

130. it gave me an insight into this whole system.

131. And particularly how the wealth defense industry,

132. which are often what families considered the

133. trusted advisers to the family,

134. are part of the enablers.

135. They re the fixers.

136. They re the ones that wealthy families hire

137. to move their money to the shadows.

138. So, one way to look at it is, the wealthy would rather

139. spend money on their lawyers than pay higher taxes.

140. If they can game the system, if they can pay for lobbyists,

141. they re willing to pay a lot.

142. So, it s not like the rich don t want to pay.

143. They just don t want to pay the federal government.

144. I guess they think the rest of us should be paying taxes,

145. so they don t have to.

146. Facing elite armies of tax attorneys and accountants,

147. the IRS realizes in the early 2000s that they need

148. to come up with a way to fight back.

149. We can think of as a SEAL Team Six,

150. an elite unit of auditors to go after the super wealthy.

151. But the wealthy move quickly to disarm this new IRS unit

152. tasked with getting their money.

153. They get their friends in government to

154. go after the IRS, instead.

155. One of the things That's happened over

156. the last 10 years is that the capacity of the

157. Internal Revenue Service to do oversight of the super-rich

158. has been decimated.

159. You re four times more likely to be audited

160. if you use their Earned Income Credit,

161. which is a tax provision for low and middle income

162. households, than if you re a super-rich person.

163. When you look at who s audited,

164. the IRS is auditing EITC claimants in the south.

165. More than 50% of Black Americans live in the south.

166. So, why is it that we see the Earned Income Tax Credit

167. getting so much scrutiny from the IRS,

168. but not high income, high wealth individuals?

169. Why? Because it s easier.

170. The typical Earned Income Tax claimant doesn t have

171. a plethora of lawyers on retainer.

172. They re an easy mark.

173. But the truth about how much taxes

174. the wealthy avoid paying is even more astounding

175. than most people realize.

176. I think that people had a cynical, jaded sense that...

177. the ultra-wealthy get away with it.

178. But, no one had ever seen the numbers.

179. Tax information is among the most closely guarded

180. secrets in America.

181. But in 2021, the news site ProPublica revealed that

182. it had 15 years of tax records for the wealthiest

183. individuals in the country.

184. I don t think anyone really understood

185. that people like Jeff Bezos,

186. who s the richest human being in the world,

187. or Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and has been the second

188. richest person in the world, could pay zero in taxes,

189. in federal income taxes in recent years.

190. Elon Musk paid zero in 2018.

191. Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income taxes

192. in two recent years. 2007 and 2011.

193. Michael Bloomberg paid zero in taxes in recent years.

194. George Soros did it.

195. And so, that was pretty shocking in and of itself,

196. that they could literally get their bill down to zero.

197. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that for

198. the most wealthy people in America the top 0.1%

199. the tax rates don t seem to apply.

200. And while Washington debates

201. raising the tax rate on the wealthy,

202. the super wealthy may as well be living in outer space.

203. We re essentially having a debate that's an entirely

204. a non-sequitur. We are fixated on rates.

205. Rates dominate our conversation,

206. but we re really not talking about

207. the essential things that matter.

208. Earthlings say the only two constants in life

209. are death and taxes.

210. But for billionaires, there s only death.

211. Here s how that works.

212. If you re super wealthy, you get to decide

213. what your income really is.

214. You simply choose not to pay yourself,

215. leave your wealth alone in your company

216. or your investments.

217. They sit on this mountain of wealth.

218. It appreciates in value and, they don t sell and

219. they don t spend down their fortunes.

220. Instead, they borrow against their fortunes to fund their

221. lifestyle or help their business.

222. While for the rest of us,

223. borrowing means going into debt,

224. for the uber-rich, it s a way to sequester

225. their wealth from the IRS.

226. And then, they can at the very end,

227. when they die they can avoid the taxes at

228. the end of life, the estate tax.

229. And so, they are really outside of the tax system.

230. Of course, wealthy individuals aren t alone in

231. avoiding paying taxes.

232. In 2020, 55 of the richest corporations in America

233. also got away with paying zero taxes.

234. Well, we end up living in a society where,

235. we the people, pay for all of the

236. external costs of the corporation.

237. So, McDonald s can give us cheaper hamburgers because

238. we re paying for the roads that its big trucks are

239. going back and forth on to create a fast food empire.

240. And that's the way every corporation tends to work.

241. They, they look at whatever s gonna cost them money,

242. and they figure out how to externalize that

243. to the public sector.

244. Where we end up in,

245. is a world with a crumbling infrastructure.

246. With no social services...

247. Unable to pay for basic medical care for people.

248. The government has no money of its own.

249. Except what it takes directly and indirectly

250. in levies and taxes from every pay envelope.

251. Perhaps the strangest part of this story is that

252. we did it to ourselves.

253. How did we become convinced that

254. bankrupting our government was good for us?

255. Even as bridges and roads crumbled,

256. the costs of college and housing exploded.

257. Wages flat lined,

258. and the middle class began to disappear.

259. This film describes some of the ways psychologists

260. conduct a science of behaviour.

261. For much of this film, we will study a simple response,

262. such as pecking by a pigeon.

263. During World War II,

264. the Pentagon hired behavioral psychologist

265. B. F. Skinner to launch a series of experiments

266. called Project Pigeon.

267. The first rule for teaching anything is to structure the

268. situation so that the behaviour is likely to occur.

269. The military wanted him to create pigeon-guided missiles.

270. So, he built these boxes where he would put pigeons,

271. and there would be the signs.

272. And the signs, the pigeons would have to hit.

273. And then when they hit those,

274. then eventually food would come out.

275. You might define reading as the ability to emit an appropriate

276. differential response to written commands.

277. Actually, pigeons are capable of good pattern discrimination.

278. And what he could demonstrate is, very quickly,

279. this stimulus and reward system would feed

280. the pigeons and they would learn even these

281. stupid creatures could learn exactly what they

282. needed to do to survive.

283. Well, that s exactly the structure

284. we ve built for Congress.

285. Shaping consists of reinforcing closer and

286. closer approximations of the response

287. we wish to condition.

288. Sometimes, we used a nudge or a kick under the table.

289. Just like the pigeons in the Skinner box experiments

290. learned which buttons they needed to push to get the

291. sustenance they needed to eat, so too,

292. Congress people learn which buttons they

293. need to push to get the sustenance their campaigns

294. need to survive.

295. And what politicians need most to survive

296. is money to fuel their next campaign.

297. This Congress in the United States spends anywhere

298. between 30 and 70 percent of its time raising campaign money.

299. But it doesn t raise money from the average American.

300. It raises money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%.

301. They have become conditioned reinforcers,

302. and they can exert a great deal of control over behaviour.

303. And if that tiny fraction objects to anything Congress

304. might want to do, it s extraordinarily hard

305. to get Congress to do it.

306. Our subjects are available when we need them.

307. So, when any major issue, like gun safety legislation

308. or health care reform or the minimum wage comes up,

309. the question is whether these funders oppose it or not.

310. And if they oppose it, it s not gonna happen.

311. The presentation of an aversive stimulus

312. is called punishment.

313. It s simple. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

314. How did we get here?

315. To a system where the rich and powerful steer

316. our government into serving them,

317. instead of the people who elected it?

318. To answer that, you have to go back to the 1970s.

319. The Vietnam War is raging,

320. and there are protests in the streets.

321. There s also a rising movement of consumer protection.

322. The abuses are flagrant.

323. Hotdogs made of substandard meat.

324. Toothpastes that don t prevent cavities.

325. Ralph Nader is taking on the big car companies...

326. Testifying here this morning, Mr. Nader,

327. I think it s a tribute that I don t have to

328. take the time to introduce you.

329. If you ll just proceed.

330. Saying that they re making unsafe cars and

331. they re profiting at the expense of people s safety.

332. And there is a rising environmental movement.

333. The public begins to demand their representatives in

334. government fix the problems and government responds.

335. President Nixon creates the EPA.

336. Congress passes the Clean Air and Water Acts.

337. And other governmental agencies step in to begin

338. imposing new health and safety regulations on big business.

339. So, you re beginning to get a great pushback,

340. and the corporate captains who have been making

341. tons of money and feeling like they sort of rule society...

342. !

343. Are thrown back on their heels.

344. Enter Lewis F. Powell.

345. So, Lewis Powell was a kind of a big deal.

346. Virginia lawyer, represented big corporations,

347. especially Big Tobacco.

348. In 1971, there s a paper written by Lewis Powell,

349. who would later be a Supreme Court justice.

350. And he warns corporate America,

351. you better fight back because you re gonna lose

352. your place in society.

353. The confidential paper becomes known as the Powell Memo.

354. Even to this day, I find that people are amazed

355. when they hear about it...

356. because it is like a document that

357. would exist in a fictional account.

358. Powell argues that corporate America is under an

359. unprecedented attack and is losing its grip on

360. the levers of power.

361. The memo presents a detailed battle plan

362. for how to secretly get it back.

363. Everybody from Ralph Nader to Ho Chi Minh were

364. freaking him and his circle out, like:

365. "Oh, my God, what s happening?

366. He basically said: "Look, if we don t organize to

367. defend business against populist regulation,

368. America as we know it is going to disappear.

369. Powell warns that the right needs to launch a

370. shadow campaign to influence academia,

371. sway the courts, and fight back against

372. liberal voices in the media.

373. It s like this call to arms of corporate America.

374. For much of the 70 s, the public sees

375. elected officials as something like their lawyer

376. the place to go to get a local river cleaned up

377. or an unsafe car recalled.

378. There is padding here, presumably might reduce the

379. possibility of getting your teeth broken if you hit it.

380. But for Powell s memo to work,

381. that needs to change.

382. And by 1980, that relationship between the public

383. and their government will come under attack.

384. - Thank you very much.

385. Skyrocketing inflation and slow growth produce a

386. new phenomenon in America: they call it stagflation.

387. Millions are struggling more than they ve had to

388. in a generation.

389. And suddenly, a lot of Americans are receptive to

390. the idea that big government is to blame.

391. All of this sets the stage for a presidential candidate

392. who will echo Powell s call to arms.

393. And then he took another crack at the American people

394. and said that we had inflation because you and I

395. were living too well.

396. You and I living too well is not the cause of inflation.

397. We have inflation because government is living too well.

398. I, Ronald Reagan...

399. But when it comes to getting people to lose faith

400. in government, Ronald Reagan may not be

401. the most significant candidate in 1980.

402. Almost completely unnoticed at the time

403. is the Libertarian Party s campaign.

404. Running as that party's Vice Presidential candidate,

405. is a little-known Kansas businessman named David Koch.

406. With his brother, Charles, working in the background.

407. I never grow tired of bragging about that.

408. They re running from the right against Reagan.

409. They consider Reagan too much of a sellout liberal.

410. There s an enormous antagonism now in the

411. American population towards big government,

412. which is unresponsive, uncaring,

413. and yes, even repressive.

414. The Koch s don t just want to get big government

415. out of the way of corporate America.

416. They seem to want to get rid of all government,

417. including ending the minimum wage and cancelling

418. social programs like social security and Medicare.

419. None of it is popular.

420. They get nowhere.

421. David Koch spent something like $2 million of his own money

422. on his own campaign,

423. and they get a tiny percentage of the vote.

424. It s a super flop.

425. David Koch s ideals are rejected by voters.

426. So, privately, he begins crafting a plan to reshape

427. American politics and rig the system to favor the wealthy.

428. And so, they go back to the drawing board.

429. And they think: Ok, if we want to take over

430. American politics, we re not gonna be able to

431. do it democratically. We can t win the votes.

432. They want to own the politicians.

433. In order to avoid taxes,

434. the Koch brothers have been making large

435. philanthropic donations to charities for years.

436. They realize at some point that they can create their own

437. charities, and they will call them private foundations.

438. And these will become sort of treasury chests

439. for their own personal favorite projects.

440. So, what they re spending on is pushing their

441. personal political beliefs, which in the case of the Kochs,

442. were extraordinarily right wing.

443. With this new strategy,

444. the Kochs divert money from the public purse

445. by pouring hundreds of millions into

446. think tanks and political organizations,

447. all geared at influencing the government to serve the

448. interests of people with wealth.

449. But none of these organizations are as effective at

450. pushing their personal agenda as ALEC.

451. It sounds kind of friendly, you know.

452. It s like that guy you know, Alec.

453. But actually, it stands for the

454. American Legislative Exchange Council.

455. And it is a really conservative organization

456. that works at the state level to change policy.

457. Here s how it works.

458. Let s say a credit card company wants to change

459. state law to make it easier for a collection agencies to

460. go after bad debts.

461. Rather than go state-to-state and try to get a law passed,

462. which is expensive and time consuming,

463. ALEC will do the work for you.

464. ALEC has created a pay-to-play system,

465. whereby big corporations can join the organization and

466. become paying members on the legislative committee.

467. A corporation will help write a bill and then ALEC

468. will replicate that bill and transmit it to conservative

469. members in state legislatures around the country.

470. Some folks back home decided they wanted a law passed so

471. they called their local congressman and he said:

472. You re right, there ought to be a law.

473. We re raised thinking that, we the people,

474. drive the bus and there we are,

475. we the people, turning the steering wheel.

476. But it turns out the steering wheel is

477. disconnected from the wheels on the bus.

478. Doesn t matter which way we turn it,

479. the bus is gonna go the direction the bus is gonna go.

480. And it turns out the direction the bus is gonna go

481. is the direction that the economic elite or

482. organized special interest groups want,

483. not the average voter.

484. Owning politicians was only part of the plan.

485. To become truly powerful, the captains of corporate

486. America need to trick the public into abandoning

487. the American Dream.

488. Before the 1980s, the CEOs of the biggest companies in

489. America earned about thirty times the salary

490. of the average worker.

491. The CEO of the company lived in the

492. same town with the workers of the company.

493. His kids went to the same school as the

494. kids of the workers in the company.

495. It was more like a family business, really,

496. where the object of the game is not to earn

497. enough money to bequeath it to your kid as a trust fund.

498. The idea was to have a company that s

499. successful enough that it s still there and thriving,

500. so your kid s gonna want to work at it.

501. You wanted your workers and your customers to like you,

502. like Macy s, so you d give them fireworks!

503. You give them a parade!

504. You contribute to the hospital,

505. and you do these things so that they re nice to you!

506. So that they like your kid.

507. They have to see you kind of as a friend of the community.

508. But, this was the time when the CEO was making 10, 20,

509. maybe 100 times more than the janitor in the company.

510. Where now, the CEO is making thousands of times

511. more than the worker in the company.

512. And, and he s not living anywhere near those workers.

513. The object of the game, winning,

514. means setting yourself apart from this company.

515. They re the suckers. You re the winner!

516. And you re relating instead,

517. you re relating to your shareholders.

518. You re relating to the board of directors.

519. You re in this other world.

520. And you see your

521. employees and your customers kind of in the same light.

522. It s like those are the peasants.

523. My view, is I don t even like the phrase work-life balance.

524. Some people come into the meeting,

525. and they add energy to the meeting.

526. Other people come into the meeting,

527. and the whole meeting just deflates and

528. those people just, they, they drain energy from the meeting.

529. As the wealth of CEOs continues to reach new heights,

530. the average American employee is working

531. harder and longer and for less.

532. Because for decades, corporate America

533. had a plan to make it that way.

534. At GE, we re in the business of...

535. In 1981, a chemical engineer named Jack Welch

536. takes the helm of General Electric,

537. with big plans for the company that is

538. already a household name in America.

539. What he did was, he decided one day,

540. that he makes less money selling a washing machine

541. to someone, than he does lending the money

542. to the person to buy the washing machine.

543. Because, when he makes a washing machine,

544. he s got to buy the metal and the glass and

545. the workers and their insurance and all that.

546. And he makes some profit. But when he lends money

547. to someone to buy the washing machine,

548. he gets pure interest!

549. The new thing is, you should try to

550. get out of your productive industries

551. as quickly as possible and get into financialization.

552. And everybody went: "You know, you re right".

553. Anybody who s actually making something,

554. or providing a service, they re in the suckers game!

555. People that go into financial services,

556. they re the ones who are making pure money.

557. So, he sold off all his productive assets.

558. All the American companies

559. started sending everything overseas.

560. And that changed the way we think of business.

561. Perhaps the most influential and imitated,

562. not to mention, controversial corporate CEO

563. of the last half century

564. As American industry begins a transformation

565. in the 1980s, so, too, do the CEOS.

566. As figures like Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca at Chrysler

567. start focusing on making the most profit

568. instead of the best products,

569. they are greeted like corporate heroes.

570. In more than half a century the big business titans

571. hadn t been so celebrated and so treated

572. as quasi-fictional characters.

573. It was remarkable.

574. This kind of kind of breathless kind of movie star adoration

575. that, that you began seeing in the 1980s.

576. Welcome to television s unchallenged authority

577. on wealth, prestige and success.

578. In the 1980s, Americans new obsession with affluence

579. fills the airwaves with TV shows like Dallas and

580. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

581. Meet the stars of show business and big business.

582. Discover how life s winners live,

583. love and spend their fortunes.

584. I'm bored.

585. And even as the standard of living begins to flat line

586. for middle class Americans, a new American Dream is

587. being marketed that says you can live the lifestyle of

588. the rich and famous using two magical words,

589. charge it.

590. - I bought my skis in Aspen. - No, Switzerland.

591. As Americans are being seduced with the benefits

592. of paying with plastic...

593. In this world where you re always

594. reaching for something better

595. Groups like ALEC are helping to get credit card companies

596. deregulated, removing any legal limit on their interest rates.

597. Because the higher you aim,

598. the bigger the payoff should be.

599. It should be, and it is, with the Discover card.

600. Within 25 years, the average American s debt quadruples.

601. And the corporate elites selling the updated dream

602. are the only ones getting richer.

603. We can t have this discussion without mentioning

604. the Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street,

605. here is this extraordinary monologue

606. by Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko,

607. giving that pitch.

608. Greed for lack of a better word is good.

609. Greed is right. Greed works.

610. And even though Gordon Gekko was ostensibly the

611. villain of that piece, he really wasn t.

612. - Thank you very much.

613. I saw that movie in a theater on the Upper East Side.

614. And there were a lot of people applauding,

615. along with the actors in the movie applauding.

616. Only this new and improved America is anything but.

617. The so-called Reagan revolution?

618. The one that got citizens to turn on their government?

619. It left the wealth of corporate captains soaring

620. while the wages of workers flat lines.

621. Minimum wage stagnates.

622. And job security all but disappears.

623. At General Electric, Jack Welch realizes

624. that in this newly financialized landscape,

625. cutting costs are the key to raising

626. the value of the company.

627. And his personal wealth.

628. And he transformed all of GE into a

629. brutally honest meritocracy,

630. in which every employee is ranked from the very top

631. down to the bottom ten percent.

632. Brutally honest meritocracy is GE speak for

633. ruthlessly firing employees, earning Welch the nickname

634. Neutron Jack. But he was hardly alone.

635. Instead of innovating new products,

636. financial innovation becomes the preoccupation

637. of corporate America.

638. By any means necessary, get stock value up.

639. For all they care companies could be producing nothing,

640. or losing money, or whatever. It doesn t matter.

641. The stock price is all we care about.

642. The financialized landscape of America gives rise to

643. a new way of thinking.

644. The CEOs view the world through a lens

645. That's fundamentally different.

646. And that's important because they drift off

647. into their own kind of fantasy world of, like,

648. self-driving cars, and everything s gonna be okay.

649. When in fact, the society that they re creating is

650. sinking into deeper and deeper crisis.

651. The story we were all sold was that the free market and

652. financialization would make us all rich.

653. That greed is good.

654. Instead, it turns out that the wealth of corporate

655. America has been built on systemic poverty.

656. If you re living on the average person s income,

657. that hasn t risen in 50 years.

658. It s the same as it was in the 70s, essentially.

659. But now you have to pay thousands of percent more...

660. for the basics.

661. Child care, education, health care, retirement.

662. What does that do? That leaves you in debt.

663. The average American now dies in debt.

664. The old implicit bargain that really built consensus,

665. you play by the rules and you work hard,

666. you re gonna have a decent life.

667. But that was really dependent on there

668. being jobs that produced valuable products.

669. And therefore, could...

670. afford to pay good wages to these workers.

671. When the productive base was automated and then

672. hollowed out and shipped to low wage parts of the world,

673. that meant that, that route to a decent

674. working class life was foreclosed.

675. What have four decades of corporate greed done to the

676. American dream today?

677. Every town s got this.

678. It s just, we re a spectacle.

679. Get—- look at it. It's not normal.

680. This is Detroit.

681. Just half a century ago,

682. it was the richest city in the world.

683. The reason we re sensitive about it is because

684. we lived in it.

685. You know, our grandpas were working in it.

686. We re

687. It still hurts.

688. And I'm telling you, the rest of the country,

689. I'm telling you: we were the spiritual,

690. mechanical, and financial center of this country.

691. Look at us.

692. You think you re immune to it?

693. Many things happened in Detroit.

694. Greed, management greed, union greed.

695. The financial crisis. Globalization.

696. Foreign competition.

697. Laziness, on our part. Race problems.

698. But what really killed it was Wall Street.

699. That's what really, really pushed it over the edge.

700. Like a stout heart within the city,

701. is Detroit Industry, which has put the world on wheels.

702. Cars once built Detroit

703. and Detroit drove America s prosperity.

704. Now the city is a shell of its former self.

705. From a population of nearly 2 million to 650,000.

706. And enough empty lots to fill all of

707. Manhattan and San Francisco.

708. Charlie LeDuff is a

709. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

710. who quit his job at the New York Times

711. to write about his hometown.

712. Because Detroit is in many ways the story of America.

713. A story of what financial greed leaves in its wake.

714. Dan Gilbert owns that building,

715. he owns that building, he owns that building.

716. He owns that building. He owns that building.

717. Meet Dan Gilbert, a Detroit businessman

718. who founded a private mortgage company

719. in the 80s called Quicken Loans.

720. By the 2000s, Quicken Loans had grown into

721. the largest online lender in America.

722. And by the time the 2007 financial meltdown

723. came around, Detroit was ground zero

724. for the housing collapse.

725. Nearly 3/4 of all mortgages in the city were of the

726. risky and suspect subprime variety.

727. Back in the day when we bundled the mortgages,

728. and they were giving them to pigs.

729. You know what I mean? Dead people.

730. Nonexistent people.

731. And they were bundling them into financial instruments.

732. Dan Gilbert, said you know, from Quicken Loans, said:

733. I never sold subprime mortgages.

734. So, I know the people at the office of registrar.

735. I got 1600 mortgages originated by Quicken Loans.

736. Took a random sample of the beautiful mortgages

737. that he issued.

738. Within 10 years, half of them went belly up,

739. and half of the ones that went belly up were either

740. stripped, burned,

741. or occupied by squatters.

742. The financial meltdown in 2007 was caused in great part by

743. the greed of financial institutions

744. like Quicken Loans.

745. Offering easy mortgages and the promises of a decent life,

746. even though that life had become unaffordable.

747. And when those loans collapsed,

748. so did Detroit.

749. But not the financial institutions.

750. The Justice Department settles its case against Quicken,

751. which never admits to wrongdoing.

752. While their borrowers pack up and vacate their

753. now foreclosed homes, Quicken not only survives,

754. but then thrives by going public.

755. A multi-billion dollar IPO, and I'm told it will be

756. one of the largest, if not the largest IPO,

757. in the US this year.

758. The sale made Dan Gilbert the 17th richest person in America.

759. We think, if the check cleared, Jim

760. But Gilbert s business dealings in Detroit

761. didn t stop with Quicken Loans.

762. We re very, very proud to have the opportunity

763. to own this, this property here.

764. Gilbert takes advantage of the fire sale prices

765. he helped ignite to spend billions buying nearly a

766. hundred properties in a city decimated by risky lending.

767. He owns this block. He owns that building.

768. He owns the building behind this building.

769. He s gonna own this skyscraper.

770. Wow.

771. Dan Gilbert had a little incentive for purchasing

772. so much Detroit property.

773. Where s Dan? Where s Dan Gilbert?

774. Gilbert, who donated $750,000 to Trump s

775. inaugural fund, seemed close to the president,

776. and his family.

777. Great friend of mine, supporter, and great guy.

778. And that is perhaps why he and a handful of other

779. billionaires were first in line to benefit from

780. a 2017 Trump tax break.

781. It was sold to the American people

782. as a way to attract investment in poor communities.

783. But in truth, it provided a loophole for people like

784. Gilbert to sink billions into empty office towers

785. in downtown Detroit.

786. While ignoring the poorer, majority-Black areas

787. surrounding downtown where people grapple with

788. one of the highest crime rates in America.

789. Detroit still has a poverty rate several times the

790. national average, and 20 square miles of empty lots

791. full of abandoned buildings.

792. Every town s got this.

793. It s just we re a spectacle.

794. We re a —-ing spectacle.

795. We were number one. Not New York,

796. not L. A., not Philly.

797. Us!

798. It s easy to look at, and go: Haha, look at these guys.

799. Laugh if you want, but you are Detroit.

800. But what happens when the rich and corporate America

801. have finally gutted it all, and there s nothing left to take?

802. You look at the, the banks, and theaters,

803. and arenas of the 1940s and 50s Detroit?

804. These are like palaces!

805. This is a beautiful, booming place.

806. And it wasn t just because it was growing,

807. but because the growth, the economic activity

808. was based in physical reality.

809. When you have an entirely abstracted economy,

810. you see it s much more like New York.

811. Where, now you have these crazy,

812. bizarre luxury towers sprouting out,

813. and up out of the landscape.

814. These towers that, you can visualize them,

815. they re extracting the value out of the city, itself.

816. And removing it up into the sky.

817. And people don t even live in these apartments.

818. These apartments are basically like bonds.

819. They re like stock certificates.

820. They re these empty boxes that represent

821. 100 million dollars, 150 million dollars.

822. But they re not living places.

823. They are bizarre pockets of abstracted value.

824. They're trapped. It s like gas bubbles.

825. You know, it s not real.

826. For decades, we allowed the wealthy to live

827. in an economic stratosphere.

828. Leaving the rest down on earth to pick up the tab.

829. If I go to the average middle and working class

830. American and say: Hey, buddy,

831. you re already paying 20 percent of your income in taxes.

832. And guess what?

833. Jeff Bezos isn t paying anything and Mark Zuckerberg

834. isn t paying anything.

835. than you did even though

836. it s the world s most valuable corporation.

837. And I go to that poor guy and I say: But guess what?

838. Despite all that, your tax rate still has to rise

839. if you want a functioning society, he ll look at me

840. like I'm crazy.

841. And he s right to do so because he doesn t have

842. the money to pay more taxes.

843. He doesn t have the money to pay more taxes because

844. he s already living on the edge.

845. Living on the edge because

846. the wealthy conspired to make it that way.

847. To rig the system so they could win

848. by making the rest of us poor.

849. But as the corporate leaders were busy dismantling the

850. American dream so their profits could reach

851. new heights, did they see where it was all leading?

852. What they don t realize is if you take all the money

853. off the table, you can t earn anymore!

854. There s no more circulating!

855. You ve made your potential customers poor.

856. You ve made your potential employees

857. poor and uneducated. And then you complain!

858. Agh, there s nobody buying my stuff!

859. There s no one smart enough to work!

860. It s because you took everything away.

861. There s no public school, you know,

862. then what s gonna happen to your workforce?

863. They re doing to America

864. what they used to do to China and Africa.

865. They used to do it to other people,

866. and it was bad enough doing it to other people.

867. The reason why you see some, some progressive awakening

868. in America is because American citizens

869. are realizing: Oh, my gosh!

870. This thing that corporations used to do to all these

871. people in Central America and Africa,

872. they re doing it to us!